CHAPTER 21 Receipts #2
"Yeah." Flat. "I know. That's the problem.
The login lives on Trinity's servers. His servers.
He owns the box the proof is sitting in.
He can log in at three tonight — he told half the building he's doing maintenance at three tonight — and rename it to look like a backup verification and there's nothing.
It's all on his box. Everything I've got is sitting on his box. "
Solanki and Raghav looked at each other across the desk.
"Then get me the thing itself, from outside the building," Solanki said, gently, to a girl he had never met. "A receipt is outside. A log is inside. A log has an owner and the owner has a delete key." He looked at the faded strip. "I have one thing. I need it to have a friend."
"So we get it outside." Sana's voice sharpened.
"You said maintenance is three a.m. The building's empty before that.
If I push the whole maintenance history to a screen down in the server room at one — one, not three, while there's nobody — and someone photographs it while I mirror the same stream out, off-site, to somewhere that isn't his box—"
"Then the photograph is a photograph," Solanki said, "and the mirror is the thing itself."
"The mirror is the thing itself."
"Who photographs?"
Nobody said anything for a second. The fan turned.
"I do," Raghav said.
"You do." Solanki looked at him without surprise. "Of course you do. You have been walking into empty buildings at night for two weeks. One more will not kill you." A beat. "Probably."
◆
The call ended — Sana saying one o'clock, server room, come alone, don't bring the loud one, no offence saab, and Solanki saying none taken, I am very loud, it is true. Solanki sat back and looked at the burner on the desk until Raghav picked it up and put it away.
"Your card," he said.
"What?"
"The card I gave you. In this office. The account number. You put it in your wallet, I watched you do it, between his insurance and his identity." He held out his hand, palm up, the way you ask a child for the thing they shouldn't have. "Give it back."
Raghav took out his wallet and found it — white, an account number in neat blue digits, one corner soft from two weeks against his hip — and put it in Solanki's palm.
Solanki tore it in half. Then he put the halves together and tore them again, into four, and dropped the four pieces into the dead tea, where they darkened and sank.
"Rate card is closed tonight," he said.
"Why."
He opened the drawer again. This time he took out the plain brown envelope Raghav had watched a constable carry in a week ago on the Wednesday afternoon, laid it on the desk, and did not open it.
"Because somebody sent me my nephew," Solanki said.
"The whole file. Station code, the date, the algorithm's little number for him — potential theft risk, twenty-two years old, computer science topper, tea at construction sites.
" His voice did not change, and that was the worst of it.
"Hand-delivered, no sender. To remind me, this week of all weeks, exactly what I am for sale for and exactly what I am not.
A very precise person did that. A person who knows me better than my wife.
" He put a finger on the envelope. "A man who has been reminded of Arjun this week cannot take money to keep an investigation focused on the wrong fellow.
It would be — untidy." A thin smile. "So.
No card. No rate. Tonight I am the honest policeman my mother thought she was getting. It is uncomfortable."
"You know who sent it."
"I know the shape of who sent it. Same as you.
" He looked at Raghav. "You told me, in my own car, that you did not know anybody so precise.
You are a bad liar, saab. I let it go because a man is allowed one bad lie in a fortnight.
But you know. And so do I — Rane cried to me about a consultant who listened.
And neither of us is going to say it, because whoever it is, is not the one on the receipt, and I only arrest people who are on receipts. "
◆
Raghav stood to go. The disclosure draft, the thermal strip, the burner's plan — all of it lay on the desk between them like a hand of cards face up.
"One o'clock," he said. "I photograph. She mirrors. You get the mirror by morning."
"By morning." Solanki was lining up the tin cups again, four movements, though there were only three. "Go home first. Sleep an hour. You look like a man who signed something he did not want to." He glanced up. "Did you? Sign it."
"Yes."
"Haan. Well. That is between you and you." He walked Raghav to the frosted door and put his hand on the latch and did not open it. "Saab. The switch. Your girl's switch. If it fires — what is in it?"
Raghav looked at him.
"Everything," he said.
"Everything." Solanki nodded slowly. "The offshore. The licences. The bias tables. The two boys, mine and hers. Your merger, your board, your photograph." He tilted his head. "You also, saab? Somewhere in the everything?"
Raghav did not answer.
"Haan," Solanki said. "Thought so." He opened the door onto the wet dark and the sleeping constable and the woman who had stopped being angry. "That is why you have not pressed it."